Politics or Porn: Depends On The Extension You Type

In a yet another example of how you can get embarrassed if you fail to do a complete domain check, prior to launching a internet campaign, the Liberal party of Canada just learned the hard way.

Canada’s official opposition party, launched a website, OnProbation.ca, on Monday to “make sure that Canadians have the facts” about the Conservatives stimulus plan, Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff said in a press release.

However, if Canadians accidentally go to OnProbation.com, a very easy mistake to make, they will be greeted with a website featuring hardcore pornography.

In case anyone is thinking that devious political enemies may have created the site to embarrass the Liberals, the porn website’s Google cache shows that it existed at least back to March 19.

In the press release, Liberal finance critic John McCallum said that the website will allow Canadians to share their economic stories and contribute their ideas.

Apparently the The Liberals first try at a website resulted in a cease and desist letter over their “Green Shift” name.

Jennifer Wright, owner of Green Shift Inc., an environmental company, accused the Liberals of infringing on the trademarked name of her company in July and said the Liberals diluted her company’s name and cost her business.

Now it looks like strike 2 for this political party.

You would think that someone, especially a large political party,  in deciding on a domain for its official site, would just check to see where the equivalent .com domain went to, and seeing that it went to porn, would choice another domain.

However, once again it’s clear that many organizations could use a the involvement of a domainer to help select a domain, and register all defensive domains, before rolling out a site.